User reports - Sailfish X

answered 2017-10-15 23:52:43 +0300

chris_bavaria
1088 ●21 ●37 ●35

I installed it on F5122 DualSim. All ok..... But I wait for upgrad some patches from patchmanager and clear new bugs in 2.1.3.5 version. My Jolla C works with 2.1.2.3, this version I wished for my Xperia. But downgread will breaking the system. Also waiting for some updates .... Xperia and Sailfish X is worth to use and the money is a good investment for me.

answered 2017-10-15 22:50:28 +0300

Bruce
46 ●1 ●2 ●5

Some info for those in the UK: the refurbished Xperia X's being sold by Argos on eBay.co.uk work fine with Sailfish X. Plus you get a guarantee and the price is competitive. :-)

The over the air (actually over the wifi -- there is no need to insert a SIM) update brought it up to the latest version of Android and there was no need for downloading nor installing 'Emma' at all.

More generally... as others have said, the flashing instructions are poor - particularly if you are on Windows and don't have Java or Android SDK already installed. It would be simpler to produce a set of instructions for use with a USB-stick Linux image as that would save Windows users from having to install a bunch of SDK stuff they will never use again.

answered 2017-10-15 22:31:59 +0300

rob_kouw
1358 ●21 ●34 ●42

First impression: great improvement from my Jolla 1. Speed is much, much better. First of all the browser performs so much faster. Bluetooth did couple nicely with my old Nokia headset, did not try music yet. Display has more light, the phone is usable in the sunshine! Some photos I took outdoor are good. A bit sharper, more vivid than Jolla 1.

Re-creation of accounts, calendars, contacts is all good from the backup. It is such a pity it does not take the entire list of installed apps as a wish list, or the settings of the apps. So I had to spend a lot of time getting up to speed again.

Things I noticed on the downside: - Interaction of the camera with CodeReader is not what it should be. I cannot scan a QR with it now, can't get a focus on close range. The same QR with the J1 scans immediately. - My Lenovo Windows 10 pc could always connect with the WLAN Hotspot of the J1, the Hotspot of the X is not even visible. - I could not download some Android apps from Google Play, even if they state Android 4.4 and up. The Alien Dalvik is supposed to be 4.4. - Browser crashes, even on a very simple home page consisting of nothing but a 4 by 10 table filled with plain text. Will load fast on second try.

answered 2017-10-15 21:41:49 +0300

pawel
14895 ●231 ●341 ●376

great screen

camera much better then jolla1 or c but not as.good as when running android

webviews tend to lag

double tap patched

gps is working, android apps also

edge swipe has to be exact to be recognized, after a day got used to it. miss fingerprint after a month of using android on it.

in total very satisfied. for me most important points are: improve camera and browser behaviour

answered 2017-10-15 17:00:09 +0300

veritanuda
611 ●14 ●17 ●21

updated 2017-10-16 00:02:03 +0300

On the whole I am rather impressed but not totally happy. ;)

A bit of background. I have been a big supporter of Jolla and their vision and was one of the fateful few who backed the Jolla Tablet hoping to experience my first real taste of a polished Sailfish install. Alas and alack that did not come to pass. However, I did find one guy who was porting sailfish to all sorts of devices including my old HTC Desire Z. I loved that phone and really miss both the trackball and the keyboard. sniff I liked what I saw on my HTC and if is was not for the terrible batery life and the laggy nature of it I would have continued to use it.

Fast forward to just over a fortnight ago and I get an email form Jolla saying they are refunding the rest of my money and if I wanted to I could put that to a Sailfish X voucher, or just give it back to development. I chose the former and sprung for a 2nd hand Xperia X and waited for it to be released.

Now comes the real feedback.

So I did , out of curiosity, apply all the updates I could to the Xperia OTA. It was a tiresome procedure and downloads were REALLY slow (200k/s) and kept stopping for some reason saying not connected to the internet. I ended up having to hold the phone in my left hand above my head like a waiter for about 15 mins each time. But I persevered and finally I was updated to Android 7.1. Great I thought, now i can flash TWRP and get ready for Sailfish install.

Unlocking the bootloader was painless. Go to Sony website. Put in your IMEI and email , they send you the code to unlock the bootloader with fastboot oem unlock <code>

You can tell it is unlocked because an ugly great warning triangle and bogus warning about "Your device is unlocked and cannot be trusted" nonsense of course because I could flash my own keys to the same DRM as they did and have it secure as I want it to be.

But I digress. The first flash did not go well at all, because even though I updated to the latest OTA build it was not the latest build needed to flash Sailfish. version 34.3 or greater is needed and so I spend the next day trying to upgrade my phone without having to resort to Windows (yuk). That being said once I did use flashtool to flash the latest firmware the supplied flash script worked flawlessly.

So what is it like to use Sailfish. Well the first thing that struck me was that the boot is hyper fast, I am not sure if that is hiding behind that ghastly white Sony splash or not but soon as that is gone poof Sailfish starts. I was used to the setup procedure and the tutorial from my HTC and I have to say they are very nice, just a pain not being able to skip it. Then I was into my experience proper. First thing it prompted me to do was install the optional apps. Android Predictive text etc etc. Like others those download failed a few times but i rebooted my phone and tried again and they all seemed to work.

The Jolla store is nice and simple and installing apps was easy. First apps i installed though where File Browser, F-Droid and the Android version of QR scanner as the native Jolla one was horrendously slow and did not seem to work properly. Android one works fine though. So hmmm.

I noticed however that the Sailfish warehouse appwas not installed. Which I found odd as I had used that on my HTC because Jolla store was incomplete at the time. The warehouse gives you access to a much wider range of apps but at a much more variable quality. Still even between these two repos there are gaps in Sailfish's functionality.

So apps I have had to install because there are no Sailfish equivalent even if there are Linux varieties are:

• OpenKeyChain Hands down the best way to manage GPG keys or search for them

• K9Mail The only usable and functional email client that can send and receive GPG email.

• Fennec a developer build based on the latest Firefox Browser releases

• Conversations In fact there seem to be NO decent XMPP clients in either store or warehouse. I am shocked.

Annoyances so far.

• GPS appears not to work. I have tried various apps using D-bus or not and never seems it is enabled. Correction. Does work after all.

• Camera is cumbersome to start up. Though fast enough when taking pictures. A quick launch facility should be added when you press the photo button twice. And be available from the lockscreen. Pictures are not too shabby though

• No in built way to browse the network. This is what Linux excels at. No SFTP, no WebDAV, no SMB or NFS shares nothing. Not happy about that at all.

• No easy way to add Tinc as a VPN, though I am working on trying to ge the Android app to work.

• Apps seem to be arranged in installed order with no way to change that. Some sort options or grouping should be available.

• No Advanced Network settings. Suppose i don't want DHCP or need to set up a proxy?

• Backups are not working properly. Seems to tar stuff up but then does not restore it properly,

• Finger print reader not working. Not essential but handy sometimes.

• NFC sensor is not working. Pity but drivers no doubt.

• No Nextcloud account support. A bummer to say the least but should be fixed in future updates I hope.

• in FingerTerm or ThumbTerm there is no way to copy selected text and be able to paste it into another app. Not very helpful for developer needs.

Now to the good stuff.

• Boots super fast like I said. Shuts down quickly too. Very impressed by that.

• The gestures are so damn intuitive I keep accidentally trying to swipe my android phone when I go back to using it.

• The UI is very responsive with a lot less bling than you are used to. Sounds are discrete and sparse.

• Battery life is exceptional, granted I am not using a cellular network only wifi atm, But even so I play with it for over a day and it has still more 60% battery left. I am excited to see if i can get same performance even with 3/4G turned on.

• Developer mode is quite easy to enable and secure to use. Using USBNet and ssh is a genius move.

• I have yet to try updating OTA so I am looking forward to seeing how smooth that goes.

• Android apps work pretty well for the most part. Some just die horribly, some are buggy but most like Fennec F-droid etc all work very well and at near native speeds.

All in all a positive experience on a not too horrible phone. I am looking forward to the iterative changes that come from some furious development now we have a sizable userbase to test against.

Good job Jolla!

answered 2017-10-15 16:39:12 +0300

edawg
171 ●1 ●1 ●3

Well, due to the rather poor intex aquafish hardware I took the risk and bought the Xperia X and SailfishX. Everything basically went fine and I successfully installed SailfishX onto the device. I have to admit that some instructions are not too clear in the unlocking and the flashing process. I was shortly confused about, should I download and install the huge Android SDK or should I trust the comment in the instructions that you can also use the fastboot app from inside the SailfishX directory, that was created during extracting. Common sense made me do the right choices but I am a bit more the tech guy than others. For "normal users" especially the unlocking is most probably not doable. So please improve it Jolla.

Positive: Everything works as promised and I am very happy having Sailfish on a proper hardware.

Negative: Well basically my fault that I missed to read before buying that tethering (wifi hotspot) is not working. This is a must for me. So please Jolla, try to implement it as soon as you can.

answered 2017-10-15 04:30:49 +0300

liqquid
1327 ●25 ●35 ●39

Bought Yesterday. Nice job, but not could be much better! After a day testing, my firs thoughts:

positive:

the os nice on this screen, and good sized icons, browser faster (but the app is still the same unfortunately), os faster/smoother a little bit, battery still on 54% after 1 day active using what is really good, good to use it again after 2 months android usage...

negative:

touch screen lags same or worse than Jolla C really bad and hard to use it now, the double tap wake up feature missing very much (temporarily sorted with some commands but I reckon it will affect to the battery..., the camera quality worse than I expected, video recording even worse - slow/lags, no fps setup (I only used 60fps recording before), no flash with recording, camera app and camera setup still really poor, music playing sound quality really bad as some people already reported, as I said the os a bit faster than Jolla C but it has still those lags when scrolling or swipe pages vertically so I can not feel it fast enough for this hardware..., internet sharing would be also important, storage only 17.7GB available...

But anyway, I hope more and more people are gonna buy the OS and Jolla will be able to fix these very soon with nice updates!

answered 2017-10-15 03:05:58 +0300

ttommila
596 ●15 ●19 ●21

Hi everybody, I need some help (again...):

I try to unlock the boot loader of my X to install Saifish X. It took me already some hours to update the phone (in many steps...would be too nice if the phone would install the newest Firmware at once...) and now some more hours trying to get the boot loader unlocked...(in total at leat 5-6 hours...). As you can imagine: I am not a pro :)

I tried and double checked everything but I think I can't update the "android_winusb.inf" driver (using Windows 10, is this a Problem?). I replaced the original "android_winusb.inf" file with the downloaded one as asked in the sony instructions. When opening the command window and entering the lines asked (on the Sony site) I get only a reply "wating for device". When chosing the "S1Boot Fastboot" device in the device settings I can't update the driver ("there was a problem with Windows installing the driver" - or something similar, I have my Windows in german language).

On the phone I have developer mode enabled and also - hopefully all - the settings asked. The instructions from Sony don't ask to update the driver via device settings - replacing the "android_winusb.inf" should be enough? I just googled some other instructions but they, as written abvoe, don't work neighter for some reason...

What am I doing wrong? Thanks for any help! Would be nice to get a replacement for my almost 4 years old Jolla1 (first ones)... BR, tt

answered 2017-10-14 18:24:40 +0300

pasik
1292 ●33 ●46 ●47

Camera picture quality is far away from original Sony camera app. Color quality is good but photos are mostly blurred. Quality like Jolla C/Aquafish at the moment.

answered 2017-10-14 17:36:31 +0300

woodenmo
231 ●4 ●6 ●8

I am quite satisfied with the official SailfishX on my Xperia. I flashed it with the official build after it had run my own. The procedure was quick and took only a few minutes. I did not face any errors.

• Native apps work very well, perhaps with an exception of the e-mail app. The rendering of messages is weird, font is very small in HTML messages, so that I have to magnify every single message when reading. I would appreciate a double tap to magnify to the screen size. When returning to the message list, it takes a lot of time.
• Bluetooth works in some way. Initiating a file transfer by Xperia to another device works, it does not the other way around, at least with that device I tested, the transfer gets interrupted.
• Import of contacts from a file went ok.
• E-mail and CalDav accounts are working fine, I have none other.
• Android runtime seems also fine, I am actually surprised how well those few apps run. I could not find a way to enable LED/sound notifications for Android apps, though, and installed android-chatmail-notification from OpenRepos, working afterwards.
• I have just inserted a SIM card, cellular network works (4G), still have to test voice.
• I still have to see how the battery life goes but was quite good with the community build.
• File system layout and sizes puzzle me, the root file system has just 880M free right now (of 2.4G). That seems too little to me. /fimage is 100% full but this is probably harmless.
• sdcard 64G is working.
• ssu status reads "device not registered". The device is recorded in my Jolla account together with my Jolla 1, I probably miss something then.
• Double tap screen wakeup works after a tweak.
• The Jolla store works fine for native apps. Apart from a market app, no Android apps are visible in there from my device.
• I find the device's display brilliant, indeed, and pleasure to read on.
• I added Coderus' power save app to activate auto power saving mode.

Thank you folks for your valuable questions and answers at TJC. Cheers!